SOUTH SOUTH THINK TANK

Institutional Hybridity
Curated by The Showroom, London
Convened by Director Elvira Dyangani Ose

Think Tank was part of the inaugural event SOUTH SOUTH VEZA which took place from 23 February – 7 March 2021. Explore the recorded conversations below.

What does it mean to nurture a particular arts ecology? What does it take, from the inception of an idea – and its resolution in terms of a form or an experience – to its encounter with audiences and critics? What is at stake for artists, the artistic community, and members of the audience, both neophytes and aficionados alike?

In recent years, institutions have attempted to comply with neoliberal financial models of sustainability through strategies more creative than ever: distributing untested ideas and discourses; implementing numerous educational programmes claiming radical pedagogies and researches; testing idiosyncrasies through unexplored collaborative endeavours; decolonising structures and programming; supporting the production of small or large-scale commissions of emergent artists; and stimulating the proliferation of other roles, tasks, and methodologies within the labouring structure in the arts to avoid exhaustion or failure.

Such degree of inventiveness has at its core the need to address context more specifically, whilst offering a degree of relevance ensuring agency for international circulation and interest-holding. How do economic imperative, artistic production and distribution, and an ethical, cultural engagement all intertwine?

This first edition of the SOUTH SOUTH Think Tank aimed to explore strategies and methodologies that various cultural agents around the globe – particularly in its South, or counter-cultural platforms in its North – are considering to strike a balance that is sustainable to their local environments, as well of interest globally. Participants brought expertise through the transdisciplinary aspects of their practices that transcend any specific frameworks. The purpose of this Think Tank was not necessarily to produce alternative focuses or centres to current dominants in the art world as seen from the South. Instead, it sought to offer a look through the myriad of connections and rhizomatic possibilities conceded to such Southernness, as a conceptual paradigm and as the catalyst for a critical and honest engagement to some of the most pressing questions in the field.

FOR WHOM IS THIS ALL FOR?

Prateek Raja & Priyanka Raja (Experimenter, India)

Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh (blaxTARLINES,Ghana)

Pablo Guardiola (Beta-Local, Puerto Rico

Moderator: Fernanda Brenner (Pivó, Brazil)

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Marie Helene portrait - detail Think Tank

RADICAL PEDAGOGIES: WHERE IS THERE TO LEARN?

Stefan Benchoam (NuMu, Guatemala)
Ernesto Neto (A Gentil Carioca, Brazil)

Marie Hélène Pereira (RAW Material Company, Senegal)

Moderator: Emma Wolukau- Wanambwa (Artist, UK)

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PRINTED AND OTHER FLUID MATTERS

Nontsikelelo Mutiti (Black Chalk & Co, Zimbabwe)
Dorothée Dupuis (Terremoto, Mexico)

Jamal Nxedlana (Bubblegum Club, South Africa)

Moderator: Skye Arundhati Thomas (The White Review, UK)

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NEW INSTITUTIONAL & NEOLIBERAL FRAMEWORKS: SHALL WE STOP PRODUCING ALTOGETHER?

Gabi Ngcobo (Nothing Gets Organised, NGO, South Africa)
Yaiza Hernández Velázquez (Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, UK)

Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz (Philosopher and Curator, Bolivia)

Moderator: Elvira Dyangani Ose (The Showroom, UK)

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KEYNOTE CONVERSATIONS

William Kentridge (The Centre for the Less Good Idea, South Africa)

Otobong Nkanga (Carved to Flow, Greece)

Shaina Anand & Ashok Sukumaran (CAMP, India)

Kader Attia (La Colonie, France)

Elvira Dyangani Ose (The Showroom, UK)

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE PRE-RECORDED KEYNOTE CONVERSATIONS

KEYNOTE CONVERSATIONS

This collection of in-depth keynote conversations addressed some of the overarching questions of this Think Tank. How do institutions operate? In our mind, their institutions evolve as spaces which operate beyond the time and place of a particular artistic experience, bringing together all sorts of forms of knowledge and creative practices. All of them of an institutional nature, where hybridity can thrive. If that is certain, what is then a hybrid institution?

William Kentridge (born Johannesburg, South Africa, 1955) is internationally acclaimed for his drawings, films, theatre and opera productions.

His method combines drawing, writing, film, performance, music, theatre, and collaborative practices to create works of art that are grounded in politics, science, literature and history, yet maintaining a space for contradiction and uncertainty.

Kentridge’s work has been seen in museums and galleries around the world since the 1990s, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Albertina Museum in Vienna, Musée du Louvre in Paris, Whitechapel Gallery in London, Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen, the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid, the Kunstmuseum in Basel and Zeitz MOCAA and the Norval Foundation in Cape Town. He has participated a number of times in Documenta in Kassel (2012, 2002,1997) and the Venice Biennale (2015, 2013, 2005, 1999 and 1993).

Kentridge’s theatrical productions, performed in theatres and at festivals across the globe include Refuse the Hour, Winterreise, Paper Music, The Head & the Load, Ursonate and Waiting for the Sibyl and in collaboration with the Handspring Puppet Company, Ubu & the Truth Commission, Faustus in Africa!, Il Ritorno d’Ulisse, and Woyzeck on the Highveld.

In 2016 Kentridge founded the Centre for the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg: a space for responsive thinking and making through experimental, collaborative and cross-disciplinary arts practices. The Centre hosts an ongoing programme of workshops, public performances and mentorship activities.

Image of William Kentridge by Norbert Miguletz

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KEYNOTE CONVERSATION WITH WILLIAM KENTRIDGE

The Centre for the Less Good Idea, South Africa

Otobong Nkanga’s drawings, installations, photographs, sculptures and performances examine the social and topographical relationship with our everyday environment.

By exploring the notion of land as a place of non-belonging, Nkanga provides an alternative meaning to the social ideas of identity. Paradoxically, she brings to light the memories and historical impacts provoked by humans and nature. She lays out the inherent complexities of resources like soil and earth and their potential values in order to provoke narratives and stories connected to land.

Otobong Nkanga’s Carved to Flow project (Documenta 14) and Foundation was conceived as a support structure actively embedded in the social sphere. Operating with the proceeds from the sales of the O8 Black Stone soaps, the Foundation (www.carvedtoflow.com) will realise its founding ambition to achieve self-sustenance. The Carved to Flow Foundation will support the activities of two spaces it has set up (in Athens and Nigeria) which will serve as bases for research and exchange on material entanglements, structured around exhibitions, workshops, and events. In parallel to its activities in Athens and Nigeria, the Foundation will contribute to foreign initiatives spearheaded by people in its network.

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KEYNOTE CONVERSATION WITH OTOBONG NKANGA

Carved to Flow, Greece

CAMP is a collaborative studio founded in Bombay in 2007.

It has been producing fundamental new work in film and video, electronic media, and public art forms, in a practice characterised by a hand-dirtying, non-alienated relation to technology. CAMP’s projects have entered many modern social and technical assemblies: Energy, communication, transport and surveillance systems, ports, ships, archives – things much larger than itself. These are shown as unstable, leaky, and contestable “technology”, in the ultimate sense of not having a fixed-function or destiny, making them both a medium and stage for artistic activity.

From their home base in Mumbai, they co-host the online archives pad.ma (est. 2008) and indiancine.ma (est. 2013) and run a rooftop cinema for the past 14 years.

CAMP’s artworks have been exhibited worldwide, including recent solos at the Argos Center for Art and Media, Brussels, and the De Appel Gallery, Amsterdam (2019); at Skulptur Projekte Münster (2017), Documenta 13 (2012) and Documenta 14 film program (2017), in the streets and markets of Bangalore, San Jose, Dakar, Mexico City, Jerusalem, Kolkata, Kabul, Delhi, Ljubljana and Bombay; in the biennials of Shanghai, Sharjah, Gwangju, Taipei, Singapore, Liverpool, Chicago, Lahore and Kochi-Muziris; at film platforms like the BFI London Film Festival, Viennale, FID Marseille, Flaherty Seminar and the Anthology Film Archives, and in art institutions such as Khoj, Sarai-CSDS, KNMA, Lalit Kala Akademi and NGMA New Delhi, Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Bombay, MoMA, New Museum, Queens Museum and e-flux New York, Tate Modern, Serpentine Galleries, and Gasworks London, HKW Berlin, Ars Electronica, Linz, MoMA Warsaw, Ashkal Alwan Beirut, Palestinian Museum, Birzeit to name a few. In October 2020 they were awarded the 7th Nam June Paik Centre Prize.

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KEYNOTE CONVERSATION WITH SHAINA ANAND & ASHOK SUKUMARAN

CAMP, India

Kader Attia is an artist and activist, who grew up in both Algeria and the suburbs of Paris.

He uses this experience of living as a part of two cultures as a starting point to develop a dynamic practice that reflects on aesthetics and ethics of different cultures. He takes a poetic and symbolic approach to exploring the wide-ranging repercussions of Western cultural hegemony and colonialism on non-Western cultures, investigating identity politics of historical and colonial eras, from Tradition to Modernity, in the light of our globalized world. In 2016 he founded La Colonie in Paris, a space for “living-knowledge” and “knowledge-sharing”.

Photograph of Kader Attia by Camille Millerand

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KEYNOTE CONVERSATION WITH KADER ATTIA

La Colonie, France

PANEL DISCUSSIONS

FOR WHOM IS ALL OF THIS FOR?

Prateek Raja & Priyanka Raja (Experimenter, India)

Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh (blaxTARLINES,Ghana)

Pablo Guardiola (Beta-Local, Puerto Rico)

Moderator: Fernanda Brenner (Pivó, Brazil)

Participating organisations in this panel hold themselves to work in non-hierarchical structures, when it comes to addressing their audiences.

This session will seek to address, among other issues: Who is the ‘WE’ each project invokes? How do we build structures around specific contexts, audiences, their desires and goals? How do we galvanise art and non-art audiences to engage in a set of ideas or commitments?

Moreover, if the ultimate goal is to support a democratic artistic experience, how does participation work and thrive? What roles do authorship and agency play in space-making and activating subjectivities?

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RADICAL PEDAGOGIES: WHERE IS THERE TO LEARN?

Stefan Benchoam (NuMu, Guatemala)
Ernesto Neto (A Gentil Carioca, Brazil)

Marie Hélène Pereira (RAW Material Company, Senegal)

Moderator: Emma Wolukau- Wanambwa (Artist, UK)

Transdisciplinary experimentation, collaborative practices and processes of reparation are all key to comprehending decolonial structures of learning.

This panel will address how to empower epistemologies that have been —and times continue to be— in the margins? How do we overcome traditional, and at times, pyramidal forms of education?

Read Less

PRINTED AND OTHER FLUID MATTERS

Nontsikelelo Mutiti (Black Chalk & Co, Zimbabwe)
Dorothée Dupuis (Terremoto, Mexico)

Jamal Nxedlana (Bubblegum Club, South Africa)

Moderator: Skye Arundhati Thomas (The White Review, UK)

In recent decades, all-encompassing platforms of knowledge and popular experience have expanded from the printed format to more fluid structures.

Through dynamic and thought-provoking methods of documentation, we are increasingly communicating in spaces that bring together multidisciplinary features, build broader audiences and hold space for first-time public appearances. This session addresses the myriad of ways in which projects are creatively making space for multiple voices, ideas and layers in archival platforms.

By exploring these new strategies, this session will ask how do we continue expanding the limitations of materials – print, web, and beyond – to allow for nuanced discursive and digital possibilities?

Read Less

NEW INSTITUTIONALISATION & NEOLIBERAL FRAMEWORKS: SHALL WE STOP PRODUCING ALTOGETHER?

Gabi Ngcobo (Nothing Gets Organised, South Africa)
Yaiza Hernández Velázquez (Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, UK)

Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz (Philosopher and Curator, Bolivia)

Moderator: Elvira Dyangani Ose (The Showroom, UK)

Whilst acknowledging the rhetorical nature of the question ahead of us, one can’t help but wonder if it holds some truth.

How should institutions produce in view of the unbearable feeling that simply going “back to normal” won’t do? Do institutions have to consider not only a Post-COVID reality to operate, but also an institutional model that is perhaps obsolete? What are the challenges we are facing?

Participants in this panel will help us to understand what critical aspects of “New Institutionalisation” means today and what are possible strategies, methodologies and, let’s admit, informal ploys, that institutions have at their disposal to go ahead with their programmes.

Read Less

FOR WHOM IS ALL OF THIS FOR?

Prateek Raja & Priyanka Raja (Experimenter, India)

Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh (blaxTARLINES,Ghana)

Pablo Guardiola (Beta-Local, Puerto Rico)

Moderator: Fernanda Brenner (Pivó, Brazil)

Participating organisations in this panel hold themselves to work in non-hierarchical structures, when it comes to addressing their audiences.

This session sought to address, among other issues: Who is the ‘WE’ each project invokes? How do we build structures around specific contexts, audiences, their desires and goals? How do we galvanise art and non-art audiences to engage in a set of ideas or commitments?

Read Less

Fernanda Brenner

Fernanda Brenner is a curator and writer based in São Paulo, Brazil.

She is the founder and artistic director of Pivô, a non-profit art space in São Paulo. She joined the curatorial team of the Present Future section at Artissima in 2020, and recent projects include group show A Burrice dos Homens (2019), Bergamin Gomide Gallery, São Paulo, Residents Section Art Dubai, UAE (2019), group shows Neither (2017) and the co-curating of Nightfall (2018), Mendes Wood DM, Brussels and Black Box (2018) at Fundação Iberê Camargo, Porto Alegre, Brazil. She is a contributing editor for Frieze Magazine and her writings featured in number of publications and catalogues, such as Artreview, Mousse, Cahiers d’Art, Terremoto and The Exhibitionist, where she is part of the editorial board. Brenner also works as an art advisor for Kadist Art Fondation and is a member of Ordet’s developing committee in Milan.

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Pablo Guardiola

Pablo Guardiola is a visual artist who works mainly with objects, photography, and writing.

His work focuses on the production of varied modes of reading and narration, as well as how they are perceived and interpreted. He has a BA in History from the University of Puerto Rico (Río Piedras) and an MFA from the San Francisco Arts Institute. He co-directs Beta-Local in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Beta-Local is an arts non-profit organization dedicated to supporting and promoting art and cultural practices through various programs.

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FOR WHOM IS ALL OF THIS FOR?

Prateek Raja & Priyanka Raja (Experimenter, India)

Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh (blaxTARLINES,Ghana)

Pablo Guardiola (Beta-Local, Puerto Rico)

Moderator: Fernanda Brenner (Pivó, Brazil)

FEB 24, 2021 13H00 GMT

Participating organisations in this panel hold themselves to work in non-hierarchical structures, when it comes to addressing their audiences. This session will seek to address, among other issues: Who is the ‘WE’ each project invokes? How do we build structures around specific contexts, audiences, their desires and goals? How do we galvanise art and non-art audiences to engage in a set of ideas or commitments?

Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh

Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh is a curator and critic based in Kumasi, Ghana.

He is a member of the Exit Frame Collective (with Adwoa Amoah, Ato Annan, Bernard Akoi-Jackson, and Kelvin Haizel) who are, besides artistic and curatorial projects, intervening in the intellectual infrastructure of professional art practice in Ghana by initiating the annual 12-day peer-to-peer intensive professional development program, ‘CritLab’, in partnership with Foundation for Contemporary Art – Ghana, blaxTARLINES KUMASI and Savanna Center for Contemporary Art, Tamale. Ohene-Ayeh is co-curator of Akutia: Blindfolding the Sun and the Poetics of Peace (A Retrospective of Agyeman Ossei ‘Dota’) in Tamale, Ghana (2020-2021), and co-curator of the 12th edition of Bamako Encounters: Biennale of African Photography in Mali (2019-2020), and co-editor of the monograph Ibrahim Mahama, Exchange-Exchanger (1957-2057) in 2017.

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Prateek Raja & Priyanka Raja

Experimenter was co-founded by Prateek & Priyanka Raja in 2009 in Kolkata, India.

With a multidisciplinary approach, the gallery is an incubator for an ambitious and challenging contemporary practice. The program represents some of the most critical contemporary artists worldwide. The program, rooted in dialogue and dissent, is considered to be a ‘pace-setter’ for its region, and extends from exhibition-making, to knowledge creation, through regular talks, performances, workshops and through it’s much acclaimed, annual curatorial intensive – Experimenter Curators’ Hub. A second, more ambitious space was added in 2018, marking a deeper inquisition into the gallery’s realm of interest.

The gallery attempts to expand the scope contemporary practice beyond the ambit of its expected role. In 2016, its artist-book publishing wing was launched followed by the Experimenter Learning Program in 2018 which enables learning in fields of contemporary and performing arts, curatorship, film, writing, language and social culture. In 2019, Experimenter Outpost, an iterative exhibitions program outside the physical gallery temporarily inhabiting
disused, characterful spaces was formed. 2020 marked the beginning of Experimenter Labs an inclusive, experimental and multi-dimensional online platform in addition to the onsite gallery programming.

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RADICAL PEDAGOGIES: WHERE IS THERE TO LEARN?

Stefan Benchoam (NuMu, Guatemala)
Ernesto Neto (A Gentil Carioca, Brazil)

Marie Hélène Pereira (RAW Material Company, Senegal)

Moderator: Emma Wolukau- Wanambwa (Artist, UK)

Transdisciplinary experimentation, collaborative practices and processes of reparation are all key to comprehending decolonial structures of learning.

This panel addressed the questions: how to empower epistemologies that have been —and times continue to be— in the margins? How do we overcome traditional, and at times, piramidal forms of education?

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Emma Wolukau- Wanambwa (Artist, UK)

Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa is a researcher, artist and educator.

Recent exhibitions include: El sauce ve la imagen de la garza de cabeza (TEA Tenerife, ES), Many voices, all of them loved (John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, GB), Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead: Bergen Assembly 2019 (Bergen, NO); 62nd BFI London Film Festival (GB); Women on Aeroplanes (The Showroom Gallery, GB & Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw PL); We Don’t Need Another Hero (10th Berlin Biennale of Contemporary Art, DE); A Thousand Roaring Beasts: Display Devices for a Critical Modernity (Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo-CAAC, Seville, ES); and Kabbo Ka Muwala (National Gallery of Zimbabwe, ZW, Makerere University Art Gallery, UG & Kunsthalle Bremen, DE). Her essay, ‘Margaret Trowell’s School of Art or How to Keep the Children’s Work Really African’ was published in the Palgrave Handbook on Race and the Arts in Education in 2018. Emma is currently a doctoral candidate in artistic research at the University of Bergen (NO) and Convenor of the Africa Cluster of the Another Roadmap School. Her video works are distributed by LUX.

Image credit: Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, The Archivist, 2018

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Marie Hélène Pereira

Marie Hélène Pereira is a Curator and Director of Programs at RAW Material Company.

Pereira graduated in Management and Business Law. After a few years of work within the business world, she shifted her professional interest to arts and culture. She is a Curator and Director of Programs at RAW Material Company where she has organized exhibitions and related discursive programs including the participation of RAW Material Company to “We face forward: Art from West Africa Today” Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; ICI Curatorial Hub at TEMP, New York; The 9th Shanghai Biennial, Shanghai; MARKER Art Dubai (2013).

She co-curated Scattered Seeds in Cali-Colombia (2015-2017) and curated Battling to normalize freedom at Clarkhouse Initiative in Mumbai, India (2017). Pereira was a co-curator of Canine Wisdom for the Barking Dog – The Dog Done Gone Deaf. Exploring The Sonic Cosmologies of Halim El-Dabh with Dr Bonaventure Ndikung at the 13th edition of Dakar Biennale of Contemporary African art (2018).

Pereira has a strong interest in politics of identity and histories of migration.

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RADICAL PEDAGOGIES: WHERE IS THERE TO LEARN?

Stefan Benchoam (NuMu, Guatemala)
Ernesto Neto (A Gentil Carioca, Brazil)

Marie Hélène Pereira (RAW Material Company, Senegal)

Moderator: Emma Wolukau- Wanambwa (Artist, UK)

25 FEB, 2021 16H00 GMT

Approaches of radical pedagogy have enduringly been linked to processes of unlearning, co-operation and critical thinking, often setting up frameworks in which the receiver is not a passive recipient, but rather an active contributor. Transdisciplinary experimentation, collaborative practices and processes of reparation are all key to comprehending decolonial structures of learning.

This panel will address how to empower epistemologies that have been —and times continue to be— in the margins? How do we overcome traditional, and at times, piramidal forms of education?

Ernesto Neto

Ernesto Neto is a Brazilian visual artist and co-founder of A Gentil Carioca

Since the beginning of his career Ernesto Neto (born Rio de Janeiro, 1964) has sought to challenge and expand the lexicon of sculpture, exploring formal and symbolic connections between different materials — polyamide, elastane, lead, spices, styrofoam, steel, among others — with the force of gravity as an underlying element. Lately he has turned to natural dye fabrics and wood, and embraced physical interaction as a fundamental aspect of his practice. Organic shapes echo the forms and colors of living organisms. Neto’s wearable sculptures and interactive installations activate the senses, inviting us to indulge in meditative states and reconnect with the sacred. Noteworthy recent solo shows include: Sopro, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, (São Paulo, Brazil, 2019), MALBA (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2019) and Centro Cultural La Moneda, Santiago, Chile; GaiaMotherTree, Zurich Main Station, presented by Fondation Beyeler, (Zurich, Switzerland, 2018); Aru Kuxipa | Sacred Secret, TBA21 (Vienna, Austria, 2015); The Body that Carries Me, Guggenheim Bilbao (Bilbao, Spain, 2014). Neto has participated in significant groups shows such as: Venice Biennial (2017, 2003 e 2001), Lyon Biennial (2017), Sharjah Biennial (2013), Istanbul Biennial (2011), and Bienal de São Paulo (2010 and 1998). His work is present in the following collections: Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Guggenheim (New York), MOCA (Los Angeles), MoMA (New York), Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid), and Tate (London).,span.

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Stefan Benchoam

Stefan Benchoam (Guatemala City, 1983) is an artist and exhibition maker with a strong interest in collaboration.

As an artist, he has had solo-shows in La Casa Encendida (Madrid, 2013), The White Cubicle Toilet Gallery (London, 2011) and La Loseta (San Juan, 2011), and has participated in numerous international group exhibitions. As an exhibition maker, he has curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions in a variety of alternative project spaces and institutions. He is the co-founder and Director of Proyectos Ultravioleta– a multifaceted platform for experimentation in contemporary art, based in the heart of Guatemala City. He is also co-founder of the Buró de Intervenciones Públicas, a collective which develops low cost high impact interventions in various cities worldwide and of the NuMu which opened in 2012 and is Guatemala’s first, and only, contemporary art museum. Additionally, he has written texts for Mousse Magazine, South as a State of Mind, and others.

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PRINTED AND OTHER FLUID MATTERS

Nontsikelelo Mutiti (Black Chalk & Co, Zimbabwe)
Dorothée Dupuis (Terremoto, Mexico)

Jamal Nxedlana (Bubblegum Club, South Africa)

Moderator: Skye Arundhati Thomas (The White Review, UK)

In recent decades, all-encompassing platforms of knowledge and popular experience have expanded from the printed format to more fluid structures.

Through dynamic and thought-provoking methods of documentation, we are increasingly communicating in spaces that bring together multidisciplinary features, build broader audiences and hold space for first-time public appearances. This session addressed the myriad of ways in which projects are creatively making space for multiple voices, ideas and layers in archival platforms.

By exploring these new strategies, this session asked: how do we continue expanding the limitations of materials – print, web, and beyond – to allow for nuanced discursive and digital possibilities?

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Nontsikelelo Mutiti

Nontsikelelo Mutiti is a Zimbabwean born visual artist, educator and the artistic director for Black Chalk & Co.

. She is invested in elevating the work and practices of Black peoples past, present and future through a conceptual approach to design, experimental publishing and archiving practices and peer to peer collaborations. Mutiti holds a diploma in multimedia art from the Zimbabwe Institute of Digital Arts, and an MFA from the Yale School of Art, with a concentration in graphic design. Mutiti is currently Assistant Professor in Graphic Design at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is also artistic director for Black Chalk & Co. a platform for archiving and publishing practices that curates cultural events and fosters collaborative projects with peers located in Harare, Johannesburg, New York, Richmond and other international centres.

Portrait credits: Sindayiganza Photography

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Skye Arundhati Thomas

Skye Arundhati Thomas is a writer, and editor of The White Review.

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PRINTED AND OTHER FLUID MATTERS

Nontsikelelo Mutiti (Black Chalk & Co, Zimbabwe)
Dorothée Dupuis (Terremoto, Mexico)

Jamal Nxedlana (Bubblegum Club, South Africa)

Moderator: Skye Arundhati Thomas (The White Review, UK)

26 FEB, 2021 13H00 GMT

In recent decades, all-encompassing platforms of knowledge and popular experience have expanded from the printed format to more fluid structures. Through dynamic and thought-provoking methods of documentation, we are increasingly communicating in spaces that bring together multidisciplinary features, build broader audiences and hold space for first-time public appearances. This session addresses the myriad of ways in which projects are creatively making space for multiple voices, ideas and layers in archival platforms.

Dorothée Dupuis

Dorothée Dupuis (born 1980, Paris) is a contemporary art curator, art critic and publisher.

Her practice focuses mostly on the intersection of arts and politics and is informed by trans/feminist, post-Marxist, and decolonial theories. Dupuis is the founder of the magazine Terremoto.mx, based in Mexico City, where she currently works as director and chief-editor. She is also co-director of feminist magazine Petunia with Lili Reynaud Dewar and Valérie Chartrain. Dupuis’s writings have been published in numerous art catalogs and publications such as Frieze (London), Flash Art (Milan), Spike Art Daily (Vienna) and Crash Magazine (Paris). Dupuis holds a MFA from the HEAR (Haute école des arts du Rhin) in Strasbourg (2005). She worked for Philippe Parreno in 2005, notably on the movie Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait. She was assistant curator at the Centre Georges Pompidou from 2005 to 2007, working with Christine Macel on the exhibitions Dionysiac and Airs de Paris.In Paris in 2006 she cofounded the artist-run space Le Commissariat, of which she was an active member until 2010. She was director of Triangle France, a non-profit exhibition and residency program in Marseille, France, from 2007 to 2012. Past exhibition projects include Prochoice at Fri-art, Fribourg (with Petunia), 2013, Daniel Dewar et Grégory Gicquel, Prix Marcel Duchamp, Centre Pompidou, 2013, Free circulation of symbolic capital, Loevenbruck, Paris, 2014, Moucharabieh, Triangle France, Marseille, 2015, Journal d’un travailleur métèque du futur, FRAC Pays de Loire, Carquefou, 2016, Regañando, Squash Editions, Mexico, 2017, The Green Goddess, Lille3000, France, 2019, Call Giovanni, Galería Revolver, Lima, 2019, XYXX010101000, Galería CURRO, Guadalajara, 2019. Current projects include IN VIVO, a solo exhibition of Caroline Mesquita at Pivô, São Paulo, that opened in October 2020, and The Green Goddess Reloaded that will open in March, 2021, at the Museo de Arte Zapopan, Mexico.

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Jamal Nxedlana

Jamal Nxedlana (b. 1985, Durban; lives Johannesburg South Africa) is a visual artist and cultural organiser.

He is in the unique position of being both a cultural producer and the founder of a number of independent organisations which support the South Africa arts community.

His own work explores themes of race, identity and postcolonialism.

He is the founder of Bubblegum Club, a cultural organisation and digital platform that showcases art and cultural production. He is also a founding member of the artistic collective CUSS Group. Over the last decade, this Johannesburg based collective has explored the hybrid culture of post-post-colonial South Africa.

Nxedlana’s images were recently featured in The New Black Vanguard, a book and exhibition addressing the radical transformation taking place in fashion and art today.

He had a virtual show with Sulger-Buel Gallery from 1 September – 1 October 2020.

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NEW INSTITUTIONALISATION & NEOLIBERAL FRAMEWORKS: SHALL WE STOP PRODUCING ALTOGETHER?

Gabi Ngcobo (Nothing Gets Organised, South Africa)
Yaiza Hernández Velázquez (Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, UK)

Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz (Philosopher and Curator, Bolivia)

Moderator: Elvira Dyangani Ose (The Showroom, UK)

Whilst acknowledging the rhetorical nature of the question ahead of us, one can’t help but wonder if it holds some truth.

Participants in this panel helped us to understand what critical aspects of “New Institutionalisation” means today and what are possible strategies, methodologies and, let’s admit, informal ploys, that institutions have at their disposal to go ahead with their programmes.

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Elvira Dyangani Ose

Elvira Dyangani Ose is the Director of The Showroom, London.

She is affiliated to the Depart-ment of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths and the Thought Council at the Fondazione Prada. Previously, she served as Creative Time Senior Curator, Curator of the eighth edition of the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary art, and Curator of International Art at Tate Modern. Dyangani Ose has published and lectured on modern and contemporary African art and has contributed to art journals such as Nka and Atlántica. She studied for a Doctoral Degree in History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University, New York; has a MAS in Theory and History of Architecture from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona; and a BA in Art History from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

Image of Dyangani Ose by Maureen M. Evans

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Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz

Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz is a Bolivian-German writer, curator and philosopher based in La Paz, Bolivia.

From March 2019 to June 2020 he was Director of the National Museum of Art (MNA) in La Paz, where he founded the museum’s Program for Decolonial Studies in Art (PED) and was responsible for generating a historical change of the institutional profile. His work at the museum has been recognized by the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art (CIMAM), being considered a reference in the international museum community for its developments in the fields of social inclusion and education. Since 2018 he is a member of the Academy of the Arts of the World based in Cologne.
His texts and cultural critique have been published in Spanish, German, English, Portuguese and French, in various formats in catalogues, magazines, and international newspapers in Europe, Africa, the USA and Latin America. Hinderer Cruz regularly publishes essays in the Bolivian newspaper La Razón.

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NEW INSTITUTIONALISATION & NEOLIBERAL FRAMEWORKS: SHALL WE STOP PRODUCING ALTOGETHER?

Gabi Ngcobo (Nothing Gets Organised, South Africa)
Yaiza Hernández Velázquez (Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, UK)

Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz (Philosopher and Curator, Bolivia)

Moderator: Elvira Dyangani Ose (The Showroom, UK)

27 FEB, 2021 16H00 GMT

Whilst acknowledging the rhetorical nature of the question ahead of us, one can’t help but wonder if it holds some truth. How should institutions produce in view of the unbearable feeling that simply going “back to normal” won’t do? Do institutions have to consider not only a Post-COVID reality to operate, but also an institutional model that is perhaps obsolete? What are the challenges we are facing?

Yaiza Hernández Velázquez

Yaiza Hernández Velázquez is a lecturer in the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths, London.

Previously she worked for six years at Central Saint Martins where she led the MRes in Exhibition Studies. Before returning to academia, she worked for over a decade in art institutions, including as Head of Public Programmes at MACBA (Barcelona), director of CENDEAC (Murcia) and curator at CAAM (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria). Recent publications include “Imagining Curatorial Practice after 1972” in Curating after the Global (MIT Press, 2019), “Cortocircuitos del museo y la autonomía” in ¡Autonomización! ¡Autonomía! (TEA, 2019) and “Who Needs Exhibition Studies?” in El Museo Foro (UNAM, 2019). She is currently preparing a monograph that reflects on the institutional as an arena of artistic and political experimentation.

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Gabi Ngcobo

Gabi Ngcobo is a curator and founding member of Nothing Gets Organised (NGO) based in South Africa.

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KEYNOTE CONVERSATION WITH OTOBONG NKANGA

Carved to Flow, Greece

28 FEB, 2021 12H00 GMT

Otobong Nkanga’s drawings, installations, photographs, sculptures and performances examine the social and topographical relationship with our everyday environment.By exploring the notion of land as a place of non-belonging, Nkanga provides an alternative meaning to the social ideas of identity. Paradoxically, she brings to light the memories and historical impacts provoked by humans and nature. She lays out the inherent complexities of resources like soil and earth and their potential values in order to provoke narratives and stories connected to land.

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KEYNOTE CONVERSATION WITH SHAINA ANAND & ASHOK SUKUMARAN

CAMP, India

28 FEB, 2021 14H00 GMT

CAMP is a collaborative studio founded in Bombay in 2007. It has been producing fundamental new work in film and video, electronic media, and public art forms, in a practice characterised by a hand-dirtying, non-alienated relation to technology. CAMP’s projects have entered many modern social and technical assemblies: Energy, communication, transport and surveillance systems, ports, ships, archives – things much larger than itself. These are shown as unstable, leaky, and contestable “technology”, in the ultimate sense of not having a fixed-function or destiny, making them both a medium and stage for artistic activity.

From their home base in Mumbai, they co-host the online archives pad.ma (est. 2008) and indiancine.ma (est. 2013) and run a rooftop cinema for the past 14 years.

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KEYNOTE CONVERSATION WITH KADER ATTIA

La Colonie, France

28 FEB, 2021 16H00 GMT

Kader Attia is an artist and activist, who grew up in both Algeria and the suburbs of Paris. He uses this experience of living as a part of two cultures as a starting point to develop a dynamic practice that reflects on aesthetics and ethics of different cultures. He takes a poetic and symbolic approach to exploring the wide-ranging repercussions of Western cultural hegemony and colonialism on non-Western cultures, investigating identity politics of historical and colonial eras, from Tradition to Modernity, in the light of our globalized world. In 2016 he founded La Colonie in Paris, a space for “living-knowledge” and “knowledge-sharing”.

Photograph of Kader Attia by Camille Millerand

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A collaboration between SOUTH SOUTH and The Showroom, London, Institutional Hybridity was a talks programme convened by The Showroom Director Elvira Dyangani Ose. This Think Tank aimed to explore strategies and methodologies that various cultural agents around the globe – particularly in its South, or counter-cultural platforms in its North – are considering to strike a balance that is sustainable to their local environments, as well of interest globally. Participants brought expertise through the transdisciplinary aspects of their practices that transcend any specific frameworks. This conversation series sought to offer a look through the myriad of connections and rhizomatic possibilities conceded to such Southernness, as a conceptual paradigm and as the catalyst for a critical and honest engagement to some of the most pressing questions in the field.

Elvira Dyangani Ose is Director of The Showroom, London. She is affiliated to the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths and the Thought Council at the Fondazione Prada.

Institutional Hybridity was curated by The Showroom, London with support by The Showroom Curator Katherine Finerty, and SOUTH SOUTH content managers Christa Dee and Lara Koseff.